Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646, he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted. Tossup Questions # In one work, this thinker consults with a monk to better understand the concept of proximate power. This thinker divided hypotheses into three categories depending on what absurdities would be implied by accepting the hypothesis as true or false. This man participated in the Formulary Controversy with a series of letters in which he attacked Antonio Escobar's use of casuistry and lambasted the moral lapses of the Jesuits. After a carriage accident and a subsequent religious vision, he published his Memorial, which led to him taking up the cause of the Jansenists. He is the namesake of an idea that suggests that the belief in God represents the possibility of infinite gain while only imposing a finite loss. For 10 points, name this author of the Provincial Letters and Pensées, a French philosopher who is the namesake of a "wager" and a mathematical triangle. # This mathematician improved Pierre de Fermat's solution to the problem of points, which determines how to decide a bet when a game cannot be completed. The rule named for this mathematician adds two combinations together to equal a third combination: the two original combinations have the same first number, which is one fewer than the first number in the third combination. The arrangement named for this mathematician has diagonal sums that are Fibonacci numbers and has rows that sum to powers of two. Name this French mathematician who arranged binomial coefficients into his namesake triangle. # This philosopher once claimed that "the whole aspect of the world would have been altered" had Cleopatra's nose been shorter. He used the name Louis de Montalte in writing a set of eighteen epistles defending Antoine Arnauld and attacking the Jesuits, the Provincial Letters, in which he also defended Jansenism. This man argued that it is favorable to accept God because, should he exist, the returns would be infinite in an argument known as his Wager. For 10 points, name this French philosopher and author of the Pensees who also names a triangle of binomial coefficients. # A posthumous work of this philosopher contains sections such as "Thoughts on Mind and on Style" and "The Misery of Man Without God." Under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte, he criticized Jesuitism and supported Jansenism in his Provincial Letters. His argument in favor of making the decision to live as if God (*) exists was included in his Pensees. For 10 points, name this French philosopher who made a wager about the existence of God. # This philosopher claimed man was the exact point between infinity and nothingness, equally capable of perceiving either. This thinker disputed the idea that a man could adopt a "probable opinion" based on the authority of a priest in a work that condemned casuistry. That work was written to defend Antoine Arnauld from attacks by the Sorbonne. This author of the pro-(*) Jansenist tract Provincial Letters underwent a "Night of Fire," after which he wrote a work asserting that belief in God was logically justified because the consequences of belief are low and the benefits high, in contrast to the high consequences of disbelief. For 10 points, name this French author of the Pensees, which contain his namesake "Wager."